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Who gets to decide what counts as "disinformation"? Combatting disinformation campaigns is just a euphemism for giving someone the power to decide what's true,

Who gets to decide what counts as "disinformation"? Combatting disinformation campaigns is just a euphemism for giving someone the power to decide what's true, and a policy of enforcing some official truth just leads to errors in decision-making.

pjc50 7y ago
Certain things are definitely false, but in attractive ways. If you don't have a process for getting them out of public decision making you end up making policy based on Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the 21st century garbage equivalent.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Again: who operates this process? Who gets to decide the official truth? You? Why? We have a process for filtering untruths out of common knowledge: ideas competing on a fair basis in public has worked for hundreds of years. We should continue relying on the marketplace of ideas instead of just accepting pjc50's official list of true facts.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I don't have a solution, and I don't even have a list of facts, but I can find out where things have been thoroughly investigated and determined to be false. It's rather like climate change, there is no one single solution and it requires continuous effort by almost everybody. Giving up on truth is like giving up on the environment and throwing your trash in the street.
    - quotemstr 7y ago
      "I don't have a solution" is a cop-out. You clearly have a solution in mind, because you've rejected the option of just letting people form their own opinions. Every single time I've seen someone make an argument similar to yours about how we need to protect the public from "disinformation", I've found that once you probe deeply enough, the real argument is that what the person talking about "disinformation" really wants is to put himself and his friends in charge of constructing official truths for consumption by the public. No, thanks.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        Meanwhile, doing nothing allows "vaccines are dangerous" and "Jews are dangerous" messages to become popular to the point that people get killed. And your response to that is that any number of deaths is better than even the most limited attempt to remove known lies from public discourse?
        quotemstr 7y ago
        It's interesting how you offer censorship as the only alternative to "doing nothing". People trying to gain extraordinary power over others always that they need special authority to deal with some extraordinary emergency. I refuse to accept the idea that edgy things said on the internet constitute some kind of Reichstag fire justifying giving tech companies or politicians or NGOs the right to decide the truth. If an idea is bad, you can discredit it using argumentation and evidence. If you can't, your alternative probably isn't as correct as you think. Who are you to decide a priori which ideas are good and which ones are bad? Who gave you that authority?
        pjc50 7y ago
        So why are we losing against the anti vaxers?
        quotemstr 7y ago
        Because experts betrayed the public's trust by spending years making false and self-serving claims while censoring those who tried to debunk these claims. Now the public doesn't trust experts even when they're right. The way to regain trust is to stop the censorship, not amp it up.

pjc50 7y ago

Certain things are definitely false, but in attractive ways. If you don't have a process for getting them out of public decision making you end up making policy based on Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the 21st century garbage equivalent.

quotemstr 7y ago
Again: who operates this process? Who gets to decide the official truth? You? Why? We have a process for filtering untruths out of common knowledge: ideas competing on a fair basis in public has worked for hundreds of years. We should continue relying on the marketplace of ideas instead of just accepting pjc50's official list of true facts.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I don't have a solution, and I don't even have a list of facts, but I can find out where things have been thoroughly investigated and determined to be false. It's rather like climate change, there is no one single solution and it requires continuous effort by almost everybody. Giving up on truth is like giving up on the environment and throwing your trash in the street.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    "I don't have a solution" is a cop-out. You clearly have a solution in mind, because you've rejected the option of just letting people form their own opinions. Every single time I've seen someone make an argument similar to yours about how we need to protect the public from "disinformation", I've found that once you probe deeply enough, the real argument is that what the person talking about "disinformation" really wants is to put himself and his friends in charge of constructing official truths for consumption by the public. No, thanks.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Meanwhile, doing nothing allows "vaccines are dangerous" and "Jews are dangerous" messages to become popular to the point that people get killed. And your response to that is that any number of deaths is better than even the most limited attempt to remove known lies from public discourse?
      - quotemstr 7y ago
        It's interesting how you offer censorship as the only alternative to "doing nothing". People trying to gain extraordinary power over others always that they need special authority to deal with some extraordinary emergency. I refuse to accept the idea that edgy things said on the internet constitute some kind of Reichstag fire justifying giving tech companies or politicians or NGOs the right to decide the truth. If an idea is bad, you can discredit it using argumentation and evidence. If you can't, your alternative probably isn't as correct as you think. Who are you to decide a priori which ideas are good and which ones are bad? Who gave you that authority?
        pjc50 7y ago
        So why are we losing against the anti vaxers?
        quotemstr 7y ago
        Because experts betrayed the public's trust by spending years making false and self-serving claims while censoring those who tried to debunk these claims. Now the public doesn't trust experts even when they're right. The way to regain trust is to stop the censorship, not amp it up.